WHEN the history of the war against Islamic terrorism is written, March 2004 may be remembered as an even more disastrous month than September 2001. The two successive victories for terror — the Spanish election result and the Israeli assassination of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin — are the worst recent setbacks to hopes of restoring some semblance of order and secur-ity to the world. These events are made more dangerous by the simplistic connection that politicians and voters make between the defence of democracy and the defeat of terror. As long as they do so, the terrorist cancer will continue to metastasise and its primary sources will never be rooted out.
Consider the recent events in Israel, America and Spain. Israel claims the right to engage in extra-judicial assassinations, to kill civilians at random and to blow up or bulldoze Palestinian houses because it is defending the only genuine democracy in the Middle East. In a sense this is true. Ariel Sharon does have a democratic mandate for his state terrorism, since Israeli voters have repeatedly rejected the alter-native policy of negotiation. In the same way US politicians of all stripes — including fundamentalist Christians and others in no way beholden to the Jewish lobby — use democracy to justifying backing Israel and refraining from criticism in the most egregious cases, such as this week’s killing of Yassin. This killing will surely unleash another cycle of terror, just as Sharon’s provocative campaign in the Israeli elections four years ago did.
We now learn from Richard Clarke, President Bush’s former counter-terrorism co-ordinator, that the President decided within hours of 9/11 that the best way to punish the terrorists would be to “democratise” Iraq, by force if necessary. Nobody can know for sure whether Mr Bush genuinely believes that an American-backed democracy in Iraq will transform the Middle East and eliminate the terrorist menace, or whether his main motive was to maintain the political support he had won after 9/11. It might even have been to distract attention from the real source of terrorist ideology and finance — the Wahhabi religious fanatics of Saudi Arabia, who are tolerated and even encouraged by some of the Saudi princes, America’s allies. What cannot be doubted is that the false dichotomy between democracy and terrorism has caused almost as much confusion in US foreign and domestic politics as the spurious connection between Saddam Hussein and the attacks of 9/11.
The most dangerous confusion about terrorism and democracy occurred in Spain. José Luis Rodrí-guez Zapatero, Spain’s newly elected leader, declared last week that the huge turnout in the election was a victory for democracy and therefore a blow against terrorists. Politicians and media commentators, not only in Europe but even in the US, have accepted his view as an unchallengeable analysis. Their argument runs that since the Spanish people spoke out so clearly in favour of Señor Zapatero’s Socialist Party, especially at a time of such agony, their decision must be right and all criticisms of the new Government’s policies must be silenced.
Yet this argument is exactly wrong. Spanish voters may well have had good reasons to support Señor Zapatero — because they preferred a less competitive, market-oriented economy, sup-ported a federalist agenda for European integration or resented the Popular Party’s attempt to blame Eta — all that remains to be seen and can be debated for the next four years. The one thing that is certain, however, is that Spanish democracy has given Islamic terrorism the greatest political boost that it has ever received.
This is why, callous as it may sound, the greatest disaster in Spain this month was not the Madrid bombing, tragic though that was for the victims and their families. It was the election. The Spanish voters’ decision to reward al-Qaeda (or who-ever was behind the attack) with the swiftest and most dramatic change of foreign policy in modern Euro-pean history, has transformed the arithmetic of terrorism. It used to be seen as a futile, nihilist lashing out against established order. Today it is much more akin to Clausewitz’s famous definition of conventional warfare: “the continuation of politics by other means”. Terrorism is brutally inhuman, perhaps even more so than ordinary warfare, but there is strategic method to its madness.
Terrorists may be mad, but they are not stupid. Western politicians may say that Islamic terrorists can never win or that they have no political objectives. But this is not how the world looks to them. The Islamists believe that they destroyed the world’s second-largest superpower by defeating the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Why should they not do the same to the US? And even if they cannot achieve total global dominance for Islam, they have more limited and potentially realistic objectives: gaining control of Saudi oil reserves and Pakistan’s nuclear weapons would be a good start. Pushing the US out of the Middle East is the main pre-condition for these objectives and European allies are rightly seen as America’s Achilles’ heel.
By electing a new prime minister whose first act in office was to announce a troop withdrawal from Iraq, Spain has surrendered instantly to the terrorists’ main demands. For the first time since the 1930s, a terrorist mass murder has immediately achieved its main political objective. From now on, Islamic extremists will no longer need to debate whether terrorism can work. The only argument will be over how many people need to be killed to achieve any particular end.
If it takes 200 deaths to get Spanish troops out of Iraq, will it take 100 or 400 to remove the Italians? And if 200 killings are needed to gain control of the Spanish elections, how many will change the British Government or eject George Bush? Such calculations may well be misguided, since some countries would prove tougher to crack than Spain. Americans would probably rally round the President after another terrorist attack and Britain might also prove quite robust, although many voters would probably blame Tony Blair’s pro-American policies.
But al-Qaeda does not need to know in advance whether it will take one dead Briton or one thousand to achieve the same political results as one Spanish death. The ratio will only be discovered by trial and error — and we can be sure the terrorists will be sorely tempted to try this out. The inescapable conclusion is that further terrorist spectaculars are far more likely now than they were before March 14 — certainly in Europe, but probably also in Aus-tralia, America and even Japan.
Had it not been for the Spanish election, this would not have been true. The bombing in Madrid could have been viewed like the terrorist attacks in Bali, Morocco, Mombasa and New York — catastrophes akin to earthquakes, hurricanes, plane crashes or other random disasters. The risks of earthquakes and hurricanes, not to mention car and aircraft accidents, are stoically accepted, despite their death tolls. Nobody argues that the world was “changed forever” by the Kobe earthquake or the head-on collision of two jumbo jets over Tenerife.
The war against terrorism may in some sense be a war to defend democracy, as George Bush and Tony Blair continually tell us. But the clash between democracy and terrorism is a very asymmetrical conflict. Islamic terrorists certainly despise Western democracy and may sometimes threaten to undermine it. But this does not mean that every powerful manifestation of demo- cracy — the millions of people in the streets of Madrid, the repeated electoral triumphs of Sharon or the forthcoming US presidential election — will necessarily be a blow against terrorism. On the contrary, democracy may encourage terrorism and help terrorists to achieve their political goals. Democracy is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for good government: a strong popular mandate and wise political leadership are not the same thing.
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